


Dwarf Women Go Bearded

by psyche_girl



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Cultural Misunderstandings, Dwarf Genders Are Different, Exodus and genocide, Fantastic Racism, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Grief/Mourning, Meta, Thorin Oakenshield has a vagina, Transphobic/Homophobic violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-04 17:28:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3075827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psyche_girl/pseuds/psyche_girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of Lady Dís, Dwarf-woman. This is the story of an impossible thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dwarf Women Go Bearded

Lady Dís travels to the Shire in springtime, as the stones are just beginning to warm underfoot. The Shire is a strange land, alien, free of metal and full of precious little stone. It is easy to see how her brother would get lost here, so far from the halls of his beloved _Khazad_.

Her brother was a good Dwarf, _Khazad_ to the core. Lady Dís is not.

Lady Dís is not truly _Khazad_ at all.

–

“Are- did any of the Company come with you?” Bilbo Baggins asks, craning around his funny round green door to peer at the guard behind her, and Dís is surprised to feel her heart sinking, as a hope she did not even know she held dies quietly away.

Bilbo is a Hobbit, after all, and it is clear to Dís now (as it perhaps should have been clear earlier) that Thorin (Thorin the good Dwarf, Thorin the dutiful) taught his Hobbit nothing about their customs. And this is right, this is proper, yet Dís cannot stop her heart from falling, just a little – because, she realizes, she has lied to herself about her purpose in coming here. She had convinced herself that she wanted to give kin-thanks to Bilbo, the only hero of Erebor that she safely can thank, for the great good he has done for her brother and her sons and her people. What she actually wanted, it seems, was to find somebody who could _understand_.

Thorin’s halfling is not _Khazad_. He may have lived, like her, as an alien creature lost among Dwarrows, but he cannot understand her, because he has never _been_ a Dwarf. He does not know the grief-songs; he cannot speak to her in the language of her loss. He does not even understand what he himself has lost, and, most importantly, he does not understand _Dís_. To him, she will never be anything but female.

“I am alone,” Dís tells him, and mourns the fact that Bilbo Baggins, beloved of her kin and savior of her people, will never know how very true that is.

–

It took womanhood to teach Dís how to be helpless.

She had no illusions: Thorin's quest was a suicide mission. The dragging weight of centuries of lonely failure had gradually worn her brother down as the shocks of Azanulbizar and Smaug had not been able to; he clung to the idea of the mountain with the desperation of one dying. There was never a question of Díssuading her brother-king, even if Dís had still been _Khazad_. She could not forbid her sons to follow him, either; Fili and Kili had grown up on stories of their birthright. And maybe, whispered the quiet voice inside her, maybe if we all go they may protect each other, and you will not lose all your family, and the Line of Durin will not die.

“Very well,” Dís had said to herself, “I will come too.” She had put her own pack together, filling it with Man-stuff, her lacy shirts and skirts and her powders. On the day her sons were to leave, she had snuck quietly out of the dwelling after them, intending to follow the party to Erebor. 

She did not understand, until she saw the frozen expression on Thorin’s face, the full horror of her situation.

Dís was woman now, and women could not fight. She could not protect her family, or her honor. She had no honor. She was not  _Khazad._

But Mahal had still made her, and Mahal made his people to endure. And so Dís had bowed farewell to Thorin's Company, had ducked her head down and stood silent and watched as her sons (no longer _her_ sons by law, but oh, Dís loved them with a fiercer jealousy than any true _Khazad_ ) followed their Lord and Uncle-father out into the barbarous East with ten misfit companions and no money and no map and no plan to return, off to face a dragon and die.

It seemed cruel that, in the end, it was not the dragon that killed them.

\--

Dís is, she supposes, grateful for the presence of her guard during the journey through the Shire, as much as she can be grateful for anything about her situation. Dís remembers the days before Erebor, when Thorin could not afford to keep her warded and secluded as a proper dwarf-leader should; remembers the way the eyes of Men and Elves and outsiders would rake over her body whenever she walked among them, hot and greedy and grasping and thickly layered with horror and disgust.

It is always the beard. The beard, first, that makes them startle, before hot eyes shift from her stout arms, her unshaven cheeks, down across her bust and the full, regal skirts and trains of her dresses, wondering over the flesh beneath.

Now, Men and Elves and Hobbits still eye her, but the burnished shields and thick axes of her guard make their gazes pass quickly, and their hungry eyes do not stick over-close to her skin. They duck their heads and bow when they speak with her, as if speaking not to her but to the ghost of warriors behind her, to the gold jewelry layered like fine mesh upon her clothes and skin.

They do not understand that these things are no honor at all. They do not realize that her jewelry is not mark of wealth, but a stolen shame, blood-money, all that she has been allowed to keep of her ancestry and inheritance. They do not see that her guards are meant not to keep her from danger, but to keep other _Khazad_ from the stain of her presence.

She has only had a proper guard for a few years now, since Dain finished ascending the throne in Erebor and finally got around to paying his dead cousin's debts. She still does not trust Dain – and part of that, she knows, is resentment over the kingdom he has not earned – but she cannot deny the quality of the guards he hired. They know their duty. In five years, they have not once spoken a single word to her, in Khudzul or Westron.

No true _Khazad_ need ever go guarded, except among outsiders and enemies, not even a King. True _Khazad_ are trusted to protect their own honor.

Among the _Khazad_ , there is no such concept as _rape_.

\--

Bilbo Baggins’s eyes do not lie uncomfortably upon her, but there is something of greed in his stare nonetheless, and something of strangeness. It takes a long unsettling second for Dís to realize that she is being stared at not because of what she is, but _who_ she is – that Bilbo’s eyes are returning again and again to the peak of her nose and her broad shoulders, to her curved heavy brow and dark hair and the sharp jut of her chin, the traits she used to share with a long-lost brother and children. Bilbo stares at her not because he sees a bearded woman, but because he sees her dead kin in her face.

Bilbo sees her watching and flushes.

“Sorry, only- you look just like him,” he blurts out, and looks as though the words cut him like knives.

Dís knows the feeling well. Dís misses Thorin like a piece of her lung, her soul, her liver, and as she looks at the anguish painting the Hobbit’s small pale alien face she thinks she may have finally found somebody else who can share in that loss.

Still, though, Dís muses, this Hobbit cannot have been all _that_ close to her brother, or he would not still be calling Thorin a _him_.

\--

Bilbo guides her into his parlor, a funny, fussy little place, covered bric-a-brac with strange books and fabrics, pillows, small chairs, and dishes, with a luxurity of candles nestled in among the mess. His cave – _smial_ , she remembers he called it – is as unDwarvish a place as could possibly be imagined, outside of Rivendell. There are no weapons anywhere, and even less metal; there is a live plant in one corner, and food that seems to be mainly different sorts of greens or bread strewn across multiple surfaces. And then there is Bilbo, tiny, soft, fuzzy-footed and fluffy-haired Bilbo, who stares at her as if she were an Orc.

(Dís _is_ fearsome, true, but it has been long years since any besides her closest kin thought her so, and Bilbo can have heard none of the old stories of her battle-prowess.)

She cannot possibly imagine what her brother ever saw in him.

“I- I’ll just- put the kettle on,” Bilbo stammers, as soon as she has sat down, and vanishes, moving so quietly Dís cannot hear even the whisper of his large, hairy feet over the wood.

He returns with tea and a bewildering variety of strange food. Dís picks at it politely, and does not tell Thorin's Hobbit that at least three of the plants he has heaped so decoratively and generously upon little china saucers are poisonous to dwarven stomachs.

\--

“I- I’m so sorry, Dís. About Thorin, I mean. Fili and Kili, and _Thorin_ -”

He stops abruptly at the look on her face.

“I am so, so sorry,” Bilbo says, in a low voice, after a second or two. “Truly. For you and your husband.”

Dís feels her face turning to stone before the Hobbit’s eyes, her gaze turning hard and flinty.

“My husband is dead.”

\--

Dís, like all Dwarrows, cut her eyeteeth on stories of genocide.

She never expected to live through one herself.

She never expected that, in the wake of dragonfire and exile and starvation and King-madness and Orc-slaughter, it would be kissing her One in public that brought about his death.

_Faggot,_ the men had yelled at Vili, as the stones and limbs battered down on the pair of them like rain. _Freak, deviant._

Dís has spent years traveling among the other races during her exile, puzzling over countless strange words and phrases, but she still does not understand exactly what those words meant. 

\--

Dís had frowned at his brother ( _his_ brother, Dís was still _him_ back then, at least to the Menfolk; such pronouns, of course, meant nothing in Khudzul). “The Men fear us.”

“They will not stop fearing us if you do this thing,” Thorin had protested. Thorin loved Dís – of that, neither of them had ever had any doubt.

Dís felt guilty, sometimes, after Azanulbizar, for the sheer weight of relief when he realized it was Frerin and not Thorin who had died in the battle. Frerin had always been the baby of the family, ever-laughing over silly, stupid things even in the midst of horror. Some days it made Dís grateful, but most of the time it was simply annoying – and, worse, _dangerous_. Dís was never sure when a careless word or a joke would come at the wrong time and get them all killed. Dís loved Frerin dearly, but even when he was alive, loving him had always been more of a burden than a gift.

Thorin, on the other hand, could be relied upon. Thorin  _listened_ to Dís, in a way that their youngest brother never had. They trusted each other.

Except, of course, when Thorin got the idea that he was right and Dís was wrong.

“You know what the scripture says, about such an exile as ours. It must be done. And besides, they will not trust us,” Dís added, sighing, “if we do not have a woman.”

“It must not be you, _nadadel_ ,” Thorin protested. “You already lost Vili. It is not fair to ask this of you.”

Thorin, unlike Dís, believed in fairness – for all Dís knows, Thorin died believing in fairness. For all the horrors Thorin had witnessed, he was often startlingly naïve.

“And which of your subjects would you ask to fill my place, then?” Dís had demanded, imperious. Back then, Dís had often been imperious. Back then, Dís had not understood the magnitude of the change he must undertake. Back then, Dís could not imagine meeting his brother’s eyes as less than an equal. “I have already found and lost my One-” Thorin flinched “-and you are the Heir. You are our leader, it cannot be you. Who else remains of the line of Durin?”

Fili. Kili. Dís's beloved children, his beautiful shining sons – he would live a thousand years in exile to keep them from such a fate. It was all for them, all of it: Erebor, Dís's change, Thorin’s own endless thankless slavery in Man-villages, selling or trading the works of his hands for scraps of food.

Thorin was _good_ , full of hope and nobility and pure _Khazad_ to the very core of his being, and Dís was bitter, twisted with the loss of his One love and the cruelty of Men. If one of them must lose their heritage, Dís knew, it would not be his brother.

“They will know of you,” Thorin had whispered to Dís, in the dead of that long dark night after Vili’s death, after all the shame and horror had worn away, leaving them both still and silent and empty of all but sorrow. Dís’s heart broke, to hear her noble upright brother, Thorin the righteous, Thorin follower of rules, Thorin who believed in all that was right, speaking such profanity. “I am not rich enough to afford a proper seclusion yet, so you will have live with us for a short while at least, and Fili- Fili and Kili will know what it is you have done. Broth- _sister_ , you will be remembered.”

\--

Those were the last words Dís ever spoke with his bother. They were the last words Dís of the line of Durin ever spoke.

In the morning, Dís stood up, and put on her dowry and her mourning-beads, and the little ear-cuffs that Thorin had stolen away for her from Vili’s body. She dressed herself in the strange Man-fabric, learning the shape of petticoat and bodice, the bizarre rustle of bare legs beneath heavy velvet brocade, and as she dressed she thought to herself: _she_ is doing this. She. Lady Dís, the female. I will be _her_ from now on.

I will be Lady Dís until I – _she_ – dies.

I will never be _Khazad_ again.

\--

“Your sons died well,” Bilbo tells her.

Yes, Dís supposes they did. It is strange that now, after so many years, the thought that they died still _Khazad,_ still honorable, still held as heroes to their people, is less comfort than she always imagined it would be.

Dís always knew she would outlive them, even before Thorin’s thoughts turned to Erebor and vengeance and suicide. There are no honorable deaths available for one such as her.

\--

Fili had complained constantly about her change.

“I do not understand,” he would whine, spitting the words out petulantly along with a mouthful of bathwater. “You must pretend to be a Dwarf-who-is-able-to-become-a-Dwarf-who-is-carrying-a-baby-inside? But how would that make a difference?”

“It’s different for Men and Elves,” Dís told him. Dís and Thorin had tried time and again to answer Fili’s questions, struggling over the foreign language-words. How could they possibly explain something they did not themselves understand?

“But pretending will not make you not-a-Dwarf,” Fili argued.

“Women and Elf-ladies wear skirts,” Thorin explained. Thorin tended to fall back on rote answers: on explaining the facts about _femaleness_ , or at least those few facts that he and Dís had been able to Dístill from the Menfolk’s and Elves’ confusing mess of tradition. “They wear their hair long, and they wear many more jewels and adornments.”

“Why should Men-who-are-able-to-become-Men-who-are-carrying-babies-inside get more jewels?” Fili complained. “They are not carrying the babies _yet_. It is not as if they are _special_.”

“I don’t know, sweetling,” Dís sighed, tugging irritably at the unfamiliar bundles of cloth around her ankles. “But they do, and so now I must too.”

“But _why_?”

“Because the Men and the Elves are afraid of us,” Thorin told him gravely. “They do not understand _Khazad_.” He and Dís met each other’s eyes grimly over Fili’s small bright head.

Dís had still not told her sons what happened to Vili. As Fili’s questions proved, they were too young to fully understand it. There was no need to borrow future grief.

“Your parent does a great service to all of us, by taking on this pretense,” Thorin told Fili.

“Your mother, Thorin,” Dís corrected. “It must be _mother_.” Thorin was worse than she was about remembering the nouns, probably because Thorin was able to forget what was happening to her; Dís, unlike Thorin, could not escape it. The knowledge lay constantly like a bitter ache inside her chest. She was beginning to hate the stupid bunching skirt-fabric.

“But _why_ do Men-who-are-able-to-become-Men-who-are-carrying-babies-inside wear skirts?” Fili demanded. “Do they need the extra fabric to help them carry the babies?”

“Woman,” Dís corrected sharply, reaching for the soap. “Say it in Common, Fili, not Khudzul.”

“And why do we have to call Dís _woman_ now? She’s still a Dwarrow, why can we not call her _Khazad_?”

Dís and Thorin looked at each other helplessly.

“Scrub your beard, _inzhudib_ ,” Dís said, at a loss, and dunked Fili’s head in the basin.

\--

Kili, younger even than Fili, was too small to question the change that had come over his parent. All he knew was that it made Dís unhappy.

\--

“Did Fili ever grow his beard out?”

Bilbo laughs at the question – no doubt to him it seems absurd, this poor bare-chinned creature.

“No,” he says, “he never would. I remember once – we had just escaped from the dungeons of Mirkwood, you know, over a month in captivity followed by a great plunge down the river in barrels – a horrible, wet, nasty business. We were all bruised and tired, and we’d left all our weapons and supplies behind and half our clothing, and there I am battered half to death first from trying to hold on and then from trying to swim them to shore, rushing here and there trying to get everyone’ s lids off, and first thing Fili falls right out onto the bank and starts yelling for a razor. Right there lying flat on his back like a drowned fish!”

He looks up at her, and the laughter slides out of his eyes, to be replaced with a wary, almost too-gentle expression. This Hobbit of Thorin’s is unexpectedly insightful, quick-witted and clever, and Dís thinks she can see for the first time how such a soft, small, pampered creature might have grown to be an asset and a treasure to her wandering kin.

“Thorin and Kili kept theirs short, too, you know, although I suppose poor Kili didn’t have much choice in the matter. I never did understand why.”

Dís swallows hard around her mouthful of tea, and for the first time since hearing of her brother’s death, she finds herself fighting the urge to cry. No, Bilbo does not understand. Nor will he, if Thorin has told him nothing, for the secrets of their people are not hers to give away.

“They never grew them out? Not even in Erebor?” Dís asks again instead.

“No,” Bilbo tells her, graciously ignoring the way her deep voice trembles. “No, not even then.”

\--

It is not quite true that all Dwarves have beards. It is true that all Dwarves are _born_ with beards, and that to lose one’s beard is akin to losing one’s Dwarfhood – to become alien, outcast, shamed. Thorin Oakenshield, in the one hundred and forty-first year of his life, cut his beard in mourning, as did his nephews, but they did not remove them entirely. The only entirely clean-shaven Dwarves are the Khazad-in-exile, the outcasts, the _Nuluk-Khazad_ , and they are not truly Dwarves at all.

But not all _Nuluk_ are clean-shaven.

Lady Dís’s beard, when she leaves it unbraided, reaches all the way down to her knees.

Thorin cut his beard and braids in mourning the day Dís first put on a skirt. So did her two sons – now called Thorin’s _sister_ -sons by Menfolk, and each time Dís heard that foul slur she wanted to rip the words out of the throats of those who spoke it – her two beautiful strong, proud children, who had lost both their parents and done no wrong.

It was less than safe; it smacked of acknowledging a _Nuluk_ , and brought them all dangerously close to inclusion in Dís's exile. Yet Dís could not bring herself to feel sorry for it; her heart sang each time she saw her family’s brutalized faces, her family who supported her and loved her as far as they were able, who loved her enough to mutilate themselves for the sake of an outcast.

Fili’s beard grew out, eventually. Kili’s did too, and had nearly reached his collarbone before a band of Menfolk caught him by the braids one night in Ered Luin and shaved him almost bare. Fili was the one who found him in the cold, dark morning after (Thorin was away, laboring a sevennight of rent out of the man-forges in Bree) and held him tightly, white-faced, until the shaking stopped, and then left to hunt down and cut the fingers off of each one of Kili’s offenders.

Dís did not learn about it until afterwards. By this time, Fili was working the forges alongside Thorin sometimes, and they could afford to rent two separate rooms, so Dís was kept secluded as a _Nuluk_ should be. But she watched Fili’s bloody fingers smear over the shadow of Kili’s dark chin from her gap-walled room across the corridor, and ached with pride for the strength of her fine dwarrow-children.

Both Fili and Kili kept their beards shaved short after that. Thorin as Crown Prince could not shave his off entirely, but even in captivity and danger, through dragon-battles and gold-madness and death and ruin, he had kept his beard cropped short until the day he died.

\--

There were thirteen Dwarves in Bilbo’s company, and not one of them was ever called _woman_.

Bilbo did not wonder at this. Bilbo was a Hobbit, and while Hobbits might not be as bad as Men or Elves about keeping their women at home, there is a reason why Bilbo Baggins was the only fauntling of his generation to be born with no siblings, and it had nothing to do with Belladonna Baggins’s fertility and everything to do with wizards and adventuring. Belladonna was extraordinary: a Hobbit-wife with a heart and a mind too large for her tiny Shire, with a Hobbit-husband who had a heart large enough to rear their child in her stead. Belladonna was an extraordinary Hobbit, but even she stopped adventuring after her children came, and Hobbits do have so very, _very_ many children: many dozens of children, in some cases, all raised at home, and all requiring many days and hours and years of time and effort to care for. And any fifty-year-old Hobbit-woman wishing to go on an adventure would have to be barren, or widowed, or living alone – and single Hobbit-women cannot own their own Smials. Gandalf, for all that he was _Istari_ and agendered and immortal, wore the aspect of a Man, and he would not have thought to bother a homeless Hobbit-woman with questions of adventuring. 

The plain truth of the matter is that if Bilbo had been born a Lobelia, he would probably never have left Bag End. 

\--

Gimli Gloin’s son (son, always son, never daughter) told his companions once that Dwarf women go bearded. It is fortunate for Gimli that his fellow Walkers (better loved than his own people, some say, and the stories never speak of that – always name him _elf-friend_ , never _traitor_ ) were too ignorant to understand, or the tale of Gimli great Dwarf-lord of the Glittering Caves would be the tale of Gimli Unbearded, Gimli the traitor, Gimli heretic and outcast and _Nuluk-Khazad_ , who defiled the highest ideals of Dwarven tradition by spilling the most sacred, precious secrets of his people to outsiders in the same breath as his lewd jokes and boasting.

(It was not only for his love of the elves that Gimli Gloin’s son earned the scorn of his people.)

But Gimli’s saving grace was that Legolas was Elvish, _powerfully_ Elvish, right down to his core, and Aragorn was _Human_ , and most of all, that both of them were _male_. The truth flowed through their fingers like water, and neither could grasp it, though Gimli had laid the most sacred of his race’s holy mysteries out like a string of jewels before their foreign eyes.

Legolas and Aragorn heard ‘Dwarf women go bearded’ and imagined perversion, a pitiful half-race of unfeminine monsters, women with man-parts attached and warping them like tumorous growths, distorting them into a twisted parody of femininity: half-woman, half-man, and all ugly. They did not imagine the truth.

(There is a reason beyond religion or xenophobia or superstition why outsiders are never allowed to learn Khudzul.

In Khudzul, there is no such concept as ‘woman’ at all.)

–

Dwarves love Once.

This, unlike many other truths about the _Khazad_ , is not a secret, but it is another mystery that outsiders do not understand. They hear the aphorism and glance upon the surface of it, missing deeper meaning.

Men and Elves mouth the phrase as an excuse for the dwindling numbers of Dwarrows; after all, if each Dwarf can only lie with one Dwarf-woman (or, the more imaginative and licentious whisper, one Dwarf- _man_ ), then surely procreative sex must occur rarely. After all, it is known (by everyone apart from Dwarrows themselves) that Dwarf-women are rare; that they do not often marry. And such unappealing women, women with beards, surely sex in and of itself with such women could not be desirable, no, only a supernatural soul-deep pull could drive Dwarf men to mate with such creatures. Surely, given all this, it must be natural that Dwarf birthrates are low. Surely the trend toward extinction is inevitable. Dwarves are a vanishing people. Dwarves cannot possibly sustain a healthy population…

They never think to question how such a population grew, in the first place. They do not wonder why Mahal in his wisdom would ever build such an imbalance into the people of his heart.

Men and Elves see the dwindling numbers of Dwarrows and think, Dwarves love Once. They do not think of the ruin of homeland after homeland; the slaughter of thousands by Balrog and dragon and High-Elf and Man and Orc. They do not think of a people wandering homeless across hostile lands (because the lands are _not_ hostile, not to Men or Elves or the so-called ‘virtuous’ races), of winters upon winters without shelter, without fires, without food. They do not think of the gold, the silver, the mithril and jewels that flow from Dwarvish hands into Gondor’s and Rohan’s coffers: after all, such ores are mere currency, to be bartered or hoarded. What kind of a people could ever require _money_ to live?

(Dwarves have always been called _greedy_ , for their love of gold and jewels and precious stones, yet elves have never been called _greedy_ for their love of leaves and trunks and branches.

This is because Men have never figured out how to hoard a tree.)

No, to Big Folk, the explanation is simple: Dwarves Love Once. Or, for the less romantic (or more honest): Dwarves have no women. So few women, we cannot even name them; it is said they travel in disguise, it is said Lady Dís is the last female of all the line of Durin. Some (still more discerning) whisper that there are no female dwarfs, and that dwarves spring, fully formed, from the same stone they dwell in. Others whisper (another half-truth) that there are dwarf-women, but they live locked away, either beauties beyond compare or hideous creatures. Dís has heard all the stories.

They never consider that there might not be greater or lesser numbers of Dwarf-men and Dwarf-women, but simply lesser and lesser numbers of  _ Dwarves _ .

\--

T he Men who set upon them so many years ago in Rohan, Dís knows, had probably had not meant to kill Vili. Their blows had been weak, glancing; stones and fists that could be shaken off as easily as bruising by Dwarrows. It was the big mob, the one that later came accompanied by pitchforks and howling hate that actively sought to  _ kill _ her  people ,. If Vili had not looked up at the wrong moment to meet Dís's eyes, none of the first little group of stone-throwing men would have been murderers. 

Dwarf skulls are nearly impenetrable; hard as iron, nearly impossible to crack.

Dwarf necks can be broken as easily any other being's.

\--

All Dwarves have broad shoulders, and generous hips, and round, shapely buttocks. All Dwarves have hard square chests, with mammary glands that lie soft and flat over the pectoral muscles. During pregnancy, these glands become swollen with milk, and remain engorged for the first year of the Dwarfling’s life before flattening out again. All Dwarves wear jewelry – some more than others, in a broad variety of places and piercings and styles. Dwarves are of the Earth, after all, and it comforts the _Khazad_ to carry something of their home, of their God, upon their bodies at all times, close and metal-warm to touch. Some Dwarves wear skirts, and some trousers, but all Dwarf-fabrics tend to be cheap, rough, and durable – they are, after all, a people living in exile, whose dearest and most necessary objects of worship are considered a system of hard currency by the dominant races around them. All Dwarves have thick, strong muscles, and tight wiry hair coating their torsos and limbs, and sprouting thick upon their genitals.

Dwarf genitals come in two different shapes. One of these shapes allows for the bearing of children; the other for the begetting of them.

The thing that Men and Elves and Hobbits and Wizards and outsiders never understand, the great secret, is this: it does not matter what lies between the legs of a Dwarf. Dwarves have no such concept as male or female. Whether bearers or begetters, _all_ Dwarves are _Khazad_.

(Perhaps Lady Dís was born with the begetting kind of genitals. Perhaps she was born with the bearing kind of genitals. It makes no difference. Either way, she lost her identity and her _self_ and her heritage the instant she took up the title of ‘woman’, because from that instant, she was no longer truly _Khazad_.)

–

Lady Dís, Bilbo calls her, and never suspects the shame like hot-coals he rakes upon her head. Hobbits cannot understand that there is no such creature. It is a chimera, the twisting foul scales of Human concepts and Elven ideals grafted onto the stunted reality of a living Dwarrow. The very term is a paradox: no such creature as a Dwarf-woman exists. The two concepts are antithetical, anathema. It is impossible to be a Dwarf and a woman at the same time. 

This is her sacrifice: to live exiled from her people, to bury herself in this strange mantle, this other-skin called  _ woman _ , to wear upon her face and body and soul the alien identity of an alien species. They call her Lady, and cannot fathom the foul depredation of the slur that passes their lips. There can be no greater insult. There is no greater wrong.

Lady Dís, Bilbo calls her, and she bends her knees, a little (funny, how women are never permitted to bow fully; where once Dís would have folded to the ground with respect, now she has no need to bare the back of her neck to enemies' axes) and thanks Thorin's Hobbit for his kindness, and smiles a farewell with the stench of rotting Orc within her mouth. 

–

When the stories are told and the songs are sung of the sacrifices of the Line of Durin, the greatest sacrifice of all will never be numbered among them: the story of Dís, descendant of Thrain, who claimed the title of ‘Lady’ and unmade herself in the eyes of Mahal her Creator in order to keep safe the priceless secrets of her kin. Out of all the dwarf-histories ever written, all the tales told, and all the lays sung, the only place her name appears is in the margins of a story written down by a Hobbit.

It is a good story, a grand and glowing tale, full of heroes and darkness and bravery and Dramatic Last Stands, and it is perhaps fitting that every named character in that story (save two small Human fauntlings, Man-children, born of women and wives) is called _he_. Bilbo Baggins never guessed what secrets lay beneath his fellow travelers’ trousers, and that is as it should be. Bilbo Baggins never thought to wonder why, of all the great and mighty and lesser dwarves in all his sweeping grand tales, Lady Dís was the only female.

Dís lives on in the secrecy and safety of a thousand Dwarrows, a thousand _Khazad_ , in all who live free today from the foul slopes of Nogrod to the golden halls of Erebor, in the Iron Hills and Belegost and Ered Luin, across Gondor and Arnor and in Gimli Elf-Friend’s so-called Glittering Caves, deep into the heart of Durin’s own Kingdom. Lady Dís is nothing but a footnote in the sequel of the tale of the great hero Thorin Oakenshield, and Thorin might be the one who won (and nearly lost) their homeland, but Lady Dís was the one who won the _Khazad_ their birthright, their culture and freedom, who kept Dwarrows what they _were_. Thorin broke his promise: Dís is not remembered, and that is the way it should be.

\--

“I knew your brother,” the Hobbit says, and

“I have no brother,” Dís says, and

it is as close as she (she, she, always she) can ever come to speaking the truth.

**Author's Note:**

> Like a lot of people, I watched the Hobbit movie and was filled with rage - among other things, because Peter Jackson managed somehow to take a work of J. R. R. Tolkien's that contained absolutely no women (besides two bit-part little girls) and make it even more racist and sexist than it originally was. That rage, as well as from several long-standing headcanons about Dwarf culture and gender concepts, resulted in this fic. 
> 
> If you also have movie-rage you'd like to discuss, or headcanons, or questions about this fic, please comment - I'm always happy to respond. Thank you for reading.


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